7 ms·

We exist! I took MDMA for the first time in my late 30s. What a fun, and joyful substance. I took it as an adult: while partying, with my wife, at festivals.

• Aurornis 1y ago
  > Responsibly (test it first!). Not too much. Just a couple times a year. MDMA fans will argue this on the internet, but MDMA use (even without polydrug abuse) is associated with cognitive deficits in memory and learning. There’s a lot of experimental evidence showing it has damaging effects on neurons. The damage done by a drug like this wouldn’t necessarily be obvious or even at the level to pass the threshold of significance in a scientific study after one or a couple doses. However, there isn’t much debate even among drug users that taking MDMA frequently produces some profoundly debilitating effects on long-term users. I think everyone should be aware that it’s very likely that each MDMA dose is incurring some level of damage that is either long-term or potentially permanent. A couple sessions at moderate doses might not produce strictly significant effects but it’s amazing how quickly people go from “a couple times per year on special occasions” to having 20-30 exposures over a decade or two, which starts putting them beyond even the inclusion criteria for most light use studies that were performed. EDIT: Also note that using DIY testing supplies on your pills is great practice and necessary in the age of fentanyl, but it’s not definitive. The only real way to test is to ship some of your pills off to one of the groups that tests for free and wait months for the results. Pills can contain multiple substances. There is a problem right now where one of the “research chemical” manufacturers has produced a large batch of a compound that is normally used for lesioning (damaging) serotonin neurons in lab studies. It has recreational effects, though, so it’s being sold as a drug. There’s concern that vendors will start mixing it into pressed pills to cut them with an active substance.
  • dingnuts 1y ago
    > it's amazing how quickly people go from “a couple times per year on special occasions” to having 20-30 exposures over a decade or two a couple times a year is 20 exposures over a decade. were you trying to demonstrate an escalation? did you mean 20 over a year?
  • serjester 1y ago
    I would love to see some studies on this because everything I've seen is either rats that were exposed to truly insane doses (10X more than a human would take) or among long term, heavy users (weekly). I don't necessarily doubt that there's some level of brain damage going on, but the extent is poorly understood and likely over exaggerated.
    • magicalhippo 1y ago
      Like those old "mobile phones are bad for you" studies, where they effectively cooked rats in microwave ovens and found out that wasn't healthy for them.
    • kin 1y ago
      Same, any existing study I've read follows abuse-level or Chronic usage. Would love to know affects of recreational usage. I'd imagine such a study would be quite difficult because so many things could affect your results: sleep, diet, age, alcohol, covid, etc. I know nothing about this but I feel like the technology exists to scan your brain before and after to see neuron damage. I just want to know if a single use causes permanent brain damage and to what extent.
    • Aurornis 1y ago
      > because everything I've seen is either rats that were exposed to truly insane doses (10X more than a human would take) or among long term, heavy users (weekly). These studies get emphasized by MDMA proponents because they find them easiest to argue against. Many of the arguments are based on flawed logic, like taking rat mg/kg numbers and translating directly to human mg/kg numbers. This isn't how drugs are scaled to animal doses (see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4804402/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4804402/ if you want to understand) so it leads to a lot of claims that studies are giving insane doses when they may not be. Honestly this game isn't my favorite because someone always comes along to point out why various studies aren't 100% perfect in humans with a large sample size and then tries to suggest that therefore it should all be ignored. If they can't attack the study, they attack the motivations of the authors or insert claims like how the sample group may have been taking other drugs. If that fails, they try to claim that the drug users may have had those deficits to begin with, which led to the drug use. It goes on and on. Here's one random study where abstinent users had decreased memory scores. The decrease scaled relative to how much of the drug they recalled using: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9855498/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9855498/ (Opponents will point out one of the authors is hated in the drug community due to past controversy and therefore they won't trust the study) Here's another one where ex-users showed verbal memory deficits, among other things: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16510479/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16510479/ It's honestly not hard to find studies like this, but what you won't find is big placebo-controlled gold standard trials with enough dosing to achieve statistical significance. That's because it's not ethical to do so, and therefore it won't happen.
• bheadmaster 1y ago
  > I did, in fact, experience seeing your wife dancing freely and openly under scintillating lights and thinking: "wow." That's not cool, man. How would you feel if someone looked at your wife that way?
  • el_nahual 1y ago
    Thanks. Fixed it. Meant "my wife."
    • Etheryte 1y ago
      Naturally, the original version was a lot more funny though.
      • amanaplanacanal 1y ago
        It makes me exceedingly happy if people think my partner is hot. Different strokes I guess
        • kirubakaran 1y ago
          Different strokes indeed
• frudyputy 1y ago
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• krzat 1y ago
  Try loving kindness meditation, never took MDMA but the realizations you describe feel very familiar.